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Rafe Needleman at C/Net says Jambo tells you who in your social or business network is nearby by checking to see if people you know are attached to the same Wi-Fi access point.
It doesn't actually know where you or they are--it just knows who's close. If you want to connect with somebody you know is in your area, you can either shout their name real loud or use Jambo's built-in instant-messaging client.
The service is in early testing on Windows Mobile phones, and cofounder Jim Young told me the company is working on supporting Symbian, RIM, and Palm OS. He wants Jambo to be radio-agnostic--it should help you find your buddies (if they are open to being found) no matter what wireless technology they have.
When the service launched in early 2005, the company intended to build out its own social network, which would link its members together with the Jambo proximity technology. Since then, the founders have realized that expecting people to sign up for yet another social network (technical term: YASN) was not a reasonable model for growth.
So they've reset their model and are now selling Jambo technology to existing social network sites.
Other social networking projects that track people and their locations include Dodgeball and Plazes. Other interesting experiments in finding Wi-Fi access point locations are SkyHook, Wigle, and Microsoft's Location Finder (part of Windows Live Local).
Gizmodo points out that the VZ Navigator gives you directions, like a regular GPS, on the LG VX9800, the RAZR and the Motorola V325 from Verizon Wireless for $2.99 a day or $9.99 a month. The MG FuelFinder shows the cheapest gas stations near your location for $1.99 a month or $5 for the Wireless Mobile Web version while the Vindigo City Guide points out restaurants and stuff for $2.99 a month.
Microsoft is bringing Xbox Live to mobile phones with Live Anywhere.
City Cloud Applications are being developed by university researchers at the University of Georgia's Wireless Athens Project, UCSD's Active Campus Project, Berkeley's Project PlaceSite and Dartmouth's Wireless Campus which tracks friends (with their permission) using Wi-Fi.
Look what's available for free...it's just amazing.
Recent Web 2.0 applications include:
- Flagr (Flags locations from mobile phones)
- Bones in Motion (Use GPS to turn mobile phones into exercise-tracking devices)
- Kamida (Tag a location with notes or images)
- Plazes (Tag locations to find other users or related places nearby)
- Semacode (Use camera phones as bar-code readers)
- Platial.com (a free mashup that lets you easily make your own clickable city map)
- Wayfaring (like Wikipedia, you build and share your own maps)
- Communitywalk (a site for mapping communities).
Microsoft's new Street-Side (above) augments Microsoft's Live Local service with a street level, through-the-window view of a city. Walk or drive.
 Dramatic stories can be told through oral history, adventure guides, shared interests and map mania.
Google Earth projects abound. Whole states are now covered with high resolution, color data including Indiana, Missouri, and New Jersey. The Google Earth Community has 3D Models built from Sketchup.
Open Croquet (WikiPedia), is a 3D world similar to Second Life, but is open source and runs P2P. Within the 3D, virtual reality environments, participants can enjoy synchronous telepresence, shared access to the internet and can design complex spaces individually or while working with others.
The Socialsoftwareweblog covers centralized social software like Friendster, Tribe.net and Orkut (Google), which let you find people of similar interests (& friends). Fandango’s Evite lets you pick a movie, invite friends, and let everyone vote on a time and place, and then everyone can click back to Fandango to purchase their tickets in advance.
Friend of a Friend (FOAF) takes a decentralized approach. FOAF profiles are normal XML text files that are stored on your website. This means that the data about yourself belongs to you and not to the social software site. It gives you the power to put the data back in your control, and on a server/website that is controlled by you.
XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their tags.
Other related projects include:
- Meetro, a location-based community building software, uses WiFi signals to discover the general location of a user without GPS. City residents are then visually shown exactly who's in their vicinity and the general interests they share.
- TagWorld provides an all-in-one web destination where users can organize and present their personalized online content via blogs, which can include photo albums, music, video, personal files, and user profile information.
- Mates, a location-based social networking system developed at the University of Michigan.
- Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it.
- Yahoo bought local events-listing site, Upcoming.org to integrate with its own Yahoo Local search capabilities while Google Local is merging with Google Maps.
- Blogdigger is a blog search engine like Technorati and Google Blog Search. Google Local and A9's Yellow Pages can locate individual bloggers writing from specific U.S. cities or zip codes.
- gFeedMap displays the location of blogs on a Google map while LocalFeeds finds nearby RSS News feeds.
- Other Location Based Services might also develop around Blogmapper (links blog entries to clickable locations on a map), GeoURL ICBM Address Server (add Lat/Long to webpages), GeoNotes, (a free JAVA app that automatically detects your position for location-tagged messages), as used in Annotate Space, Trepia (a location-based list of other nearby Instant Messaging users), the VideoBlogMap uses GoogleMaps, and WWMX Travelogue (GPS tagged maps, photographs and text).
- Skyhook Wireless, a software-only positioning system, uses a nationwide database of known Wi-Fi access points to calculate the precise location of any Wi-Fi device - without new hardware. Skyhook says they created a reference database of over 1.5 million private and public access points and can calculate a device’s location to within 20-40 meters. It's being rolled out in 25 metropolitan areas.
- Navizon provides your exact location in real time, and companies can send you messages about a restaurant of a film opening near the place where you are. Navizon knows the geographic locations of Hotspots and Cellular Towers in a specified city, and is able to determine your Latitude and Longitude via the software.
Supplying a city-wide connection is not enough. Cities in Asia are already moving well beyond broadband wireless, becoming economic clusters. They're now crackling powerhouses with a global presence.
We can re-envision the city. Enriching shared memory is one strategy. It can bring people together under "the cloud", while maintaining the continuity and viability of our institutions.
 A city-sponsored web experience could be like a World's Fair. Innovative, memorable and world-class. It must provide inspiration and real benefits for all citizens. It must be compelling, vital and dynamic. Open source. Free admission.
Soon entire cities will be online, sharing space. They can become a model and a destination. Every citizen can be a hero (or a criminal). Architecture and image are important. They shape the city.
Second Story, an interactive media studio in Portland, runs a great shop. They're sought by National Geographic, Discover and other media companies and are currently looking for web designers to pioneer new forms of interactive storytelling, creating novel concepts for leading museums.
Cities are living museums. Repositories of culture and context. Admittance is free with a cellphone. Soon a $129 Nintendo and $200 PSP will play. Wireless iPods and XBoxes are next up. The city as game grid.
Wireless clouds and the internet are opening up businesses and cities. Neighborhoods, communities and cities are brands. We must shape a compelling environment. This is The World Cup.
The NY Times has a Special Network Edition of Circuits that describes how networked computing is allowing workers to work differently. In the wireless city.
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